Some Bears are reporting a major bit of avoidance loss on the PTR, this has a lot to do with the fact that Blizzard has said that they don’t like where Tanking Avoidance is [apparently mitigation is fine, and if 25 man Kolo and ignis are any indication I’m inclined to agree]. They don’t like the fact that tanks can avoid nearly 50% of the bosses incoming attacks and therefore 50% of what the boss throws at tank are just ignored anyway. So as a way to start to cut away at this, Blizzard has decided to re-work the formula that they use to handle how dodge is calculated [I can already feel the rogue tears]. In fact they think dodge is currently OP.

First off I would like to state that this has nothing to do with druids, I’m just way to lazy to manage two blogs in one! >.>

Point is that the “Severely Unrelated Category” is all about my thoughts behind the screen rather than anything having to do with WoW

Really, what interest me is that 4chan is down again, now if you have any knowledge of the site, than you know that its goes up and down as the years go by. Fractions within its userbase for whatever reason feel the need to bring the site down via a DDoS attack. After several years this is really just part of the ebb and flow of things and really isn’t all that out of the ordinary. But something that does occur to me, is that after 5 years+ of running 4chan.org, what would happen to its userbase if it were to shut down or be permanently taken offline. Though I doubt very much that this point is coming any time soon, M00t has stated over and over again that he can’t really deal with the soaring cost associated with keeping the site up in comparison with the rather weak add revenue due in part to the sites reputation on the web and because most of its users are web savvy to some degree.

Along with all the new cosmetic changes [and about 50 of the gold I had when Lynxchan was ported from Gilneas to the PRT being used entirely on haircuts] The PTR really does have some very new things going on. First of all the Argent Tournament has a new Instance [as most of you already know about], and even a whole full set of dailies. But what I found most interesting is that those with the Crusader title can turn in their “Champions Seals” not only for a Bridle that you apply to your squire [someone explain to me how that isn’t wrong] but you can also use them to buy the new [and some of the old] PvE oriented Heirloom items. These include a full new set of chest pieces that like the shoulders give a 10% bonus to experience gain. All the weapons and trinkets are there as well.

On top of that I found a nifty little jewel being sold by the Emblems of Triumph: Here

Recently, Blizzard announced that they are working on a way to let players change their faction. There is no note about this being implemented in 3.2, however it does show some very interesting things in terms of the way the Blizzard Franchise has been developing. It has been noted that Blizzard has more than likely finally hit their cap in terms of playerbase, and at this point it can only stabilize or shrink, with little or no chance of seeing massive improvement in terms of actual userbase: [thanks wow economics for putting that piece together ] . The point is that Blizzard realizes that there is little more they can do to bring in new players, and most people who will be picking up the game are just players that they managed to loose somewhere along the way. With that in mind they are no longer gearing their patches or design ideas towards picking up new players [which shows with wanting to get players to level 80 as soon as possible] they are also gearing the patches more towards picking up alts and getting them to Main level gear etc.

But now they’ve stepped into an area that Blizzard said over and over again that they just weren’t interested in doing:

Over at MMO-Champion they have managed to dig out and find all of the season 7 gladiator gear as well as the models that will supposedly be coming with it, now some things to note: First off, I’m not really sure how which side they actually managed to dig up, as Blizzard has claimed they would like Horde and Alliance to be sitting pretty in 2 different gear sets. But it looks like we’ll at least know for sure what the stats are. The druid one I have seen 2 versions of, and I’m going to assume that the one that MMO Champion is showing off in their post is the Alliance version:

Well, I know a few of you out there have been looking for more than just those static images that Blizzard provided back in early June, so a few brave druids are sitting on the test realms making video’s of us up to our usual druid shenanigans. Needless to say youtube user techbeat2k has made a wonderful video demonstrating all of the new forms, their colors, as well as the hair cut that is associated with each of them. I didn’t notice during the video the model glitches that the PTR was talking about [or looking for] that include a problem with the Collar showing the same way no matter what angle you look at it from.

Anyway here is the video, please sit back and enjoy [along with the nifty theme music]